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Thank you for finding your way to my website. You’ll find here pages linking you to my book publications as well as a series of recent (2012-2015) blog posts, some original, some reposted from previous serial publications on the post-earthquake situation in Haiti, as well as the current crisis occasioned by ruling 168-13 of September 23, 2013 issued against Dominicans of Haitian descent by the Tribunal Court of the Dominican Republic.

Recently relocated to the West Coast, where I am currently an Endowed Chair in the Humanities @ the Claremont Colleges, I have been thankful for a year’s reprieve as a Guggenheim Fellow (2014-15) to work on my 4th academic monograph on intra-African Diasporic artistic/literary conversations. I also plugged away at a post-earthquake novel. I hope that both these manuscripts will see the light of day very soon.

For a newly published excerpt from the novel-in-progress, Douze, please follow the following link to Il Tolomeo, the comparative literature journal of the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy:

“Where love is, there is transformation. Without love, revolution has no meaning, for then revolution is merely destruction, decay, a greater and greater ever-mounting misery. Where there is love, there is revolution, because love is transformation from moment to moment.” – Krishnamurti, The First & Last Freedoms

REVIEWS OF FROM SUGAR TO REVOLUTION: WOMEN’S VISIONS OF HAITI, CUBA & THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (2012)

“In this original and provocative study, Myriam Chancy reads the catastrophic history of the Caribbean in the narrative and visual fictions of a number of remarkable women artists, disclosing hitherto uncharted maps of time and voice and remembrance. A work of studied insight, engaged criticism, and graceful sentences, it will alter not only the frames in which Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic are represented, but the very conditions for a gendered and transnational inquiry into the Caribbean present.”

— David Scott, Columbia University, Editor, Small Axe

“Rich and suggestive, this broad-ranging and original study combines interpretive readings and personal conversations with individual artists. Chancy places women’s bodies, voices, memories, and visions at the centre of a careful scrutiny of the way three global axes of power—sugar, sovereignty, and revolution—have defined and confined Caribbean history, with its traumatic events and lingering painful memories. Conjugating national and transnational approaches to the Creolophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone islands, Chancy redefines our understanding of terror by opening up innovative cultural and scholarly avenues for hopeful new beginnings. This is a transformative intervention in the contemporary realities of the region.”

— Françoise Lionnet, UCLA, Co-editor, The Creolization of Theory

“Chancy’s multifaceted study examines contemporary Cuban, Haitian, and Dominican women’s use of literary and performance arts to resurrect marginalized and silenced subjects’ memories. Her paradigm for constructing cohesive Caribbean relations is the Haitian Revolution’s broad rejection of the French occupation, Haiti’s reclamation of national sovereignty, freedom from the imposition of Enlightenment logic, and reassertion of collective national memory. Troubling for Chancy’s transformative vision is neighbouring nations’ acceptance of imposed rather than original, indigenous cultures, thereby rejecting association with Haiti’s black majority population…. This book is an incredible read.”

— J.C. Richards, Park University, Choice

REVIEWS OF SPIRIT OF HAITI

“This accomplished and haunting debut…is a surreal tour de force set in Haiti during the 1990s….The prose is energetic and filled with poignancy so deeply felt, it resonates long after the story has been told….lyrical and breathtaking….Chancy is a writer who cares about words and pace and tells her story in deft strokes….This sensitive portrait of a people whose spirit might be quashed but not diminished is a compelling read.”– Irene D’Souza, “Surreal tour de force set in Haiti,” Winnipeg Free Press, March 2005

“Chancy’s [prose] brims with literary devices and rich images that transpose the harsh realities of Duvalier’s terror-based regime against the personal dreams of her individual characters….in Chancy’s world, true meaning resides in the intangible rather than in material reality.”– WorldPulse, Winter 2004

REVIEWS OF THE SCORPION CLAW

“somber and ethereal”

– Colin Rickards, forthcoming review, SheCaribbean
“…readers can tell from the onset that the former professor has shed her scholarly cloak for a writer’s mantle….[The] Scorpion’s Claw is reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, in the emotions she evokes.”

– Malcollvie Jean-François, “Chancy Frees Voices in ‘Scorpion’s Claw’,” Haitian Times, Sept. 2005
“Chancy may well become a grand dame of Haitian literature…luminous and realistic…[s]he captures her readers and never loses their attention….in evocative and illuminating prose….the story she tells of the plight of a Haitian family, serves as an important and worthy subtext for all the political and genocidal atrocities that haunt our television broadcasts on any given day.”

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Reviews for Loneliness of Angels (2010)

"A major new work in Caribbean fiction."- Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award Jury

"The Loneliness of Angels is ambitious...an important document of contemporary Haiti as affected by its recent history and its connections with the outside world."- Al Creighton's "Arts on Sunday," Sunday Stabroek, Guyana (September 25, 2011)

"The Loneliness of Angels reframes migration...as movement that both marks the people and history of the Caribbean and links to something beyond, what [Chancy] has recently called 'the ability to conceive of a world greater than ourselves and greater than the islands of our origins.' ....With [this novel] Chancy has exploited and expanded the novel's form to leave her readers with memorable characters and compelling stories..."- Sarah Barbour, "The Movement of Migration," The Caribbean Writer Vol. 25 (Summer 2011)

"Anthems, songs to angels, a character's obsession with Chopin -- music provides spaces of reprieve within the painful memories captured by this novel....[Ruth]'s a fascinating figure [revealed] in a gripping first sentence -- 'Ruth smoothes the plastic covering her memory table as if she is trying to undo wrinkles in time'....The character Rose is even more compelling...The chapter devoted to her is worth the price of the book."- Winnipeg Free Press, 4/7/10